In need of a past.

Byra was only first inhabited about 60 years ago. So my traders are in dire need of somewhere to originally come from. They are an industrious lot. Well, as long as there is coin at stake. Religion doesn't interest them much. The only thing they take much stake in is the moon. Full moons are seen as a time to stay indoors as there is no telling what madness might befall those caught out in such times. They would of course follow the beliefs of their parent culture in regards to our losing of a moon. So are there any out there who would wish to claim the commanding majority of my people's history?

Have you thought that perhaps your islanders are from just one island? Maybe a trading consortium with members from all of the major islands decided to set up a base on the island which caused others to start immigrating to the island.

I guess you are close enough - and my Niel are good enough at sea travel - to pursue the possibility of them being your origin culture. However, I never really figured the Niel for a culture all that interested in colonizing, except for much closer to home. It would be easy enough to dream up an exception, though - perhaps a charismatic leader who took a couple of the first deep sea-worthy vessels and set out to find paradise. Instead he ended up in your shithole. (Joking, of course!). It's a bit of a stretch, but the Niel are both mariners and merchants, so it provides at least a partially plausible origin for a money-centric culture. Can be plenty of good stories to write about their journey and survival, too...

Hmm. I'm still a bit concerned about the notion of having that large a piece of real estate sitting in the center of everything going uninhabited for so long–even if the whole thing was popped out of the water as a result of the cataclysm: that's still 250 years. Even if what had been there before was completely paved over by a volcanic explosion, much of the ecosystem would have recovered within a single generation; and even if large-scale trading in the Archipelago wasn't resumed for a couple of generations, it would still have been noticed (or re-noticed) long before then. I think you're going to have to work in some reason for it to have gone unoccupied for so long… or at least to explain why your people are the only ones there now. (One way would have been what happened when the Euros hit the Americas… the introduction of diseases for which the natives had no resistance. Though that raises the question of why they weren't exposed to those diseases before that time: the Archipelago's big, but it isn't that big.)